i/s Back Issues

Volume 16

No. 6  July/August 2001

Summer Break: Teachers Dive into Adventures in Modeling

Lee Ridgway

Can computer-based modeling of complex, dynamic systems help teach science and math to junior and senior high school students? That's the premise of Adventures in Modeling, a summer workshop now in its fourth year that gives educators hands-on experience in creating models.

The workshop is co-sponsored by the Media Lab and the Santa Fe Institute, with sessions held both at MIT and in Santa Fe. It is led by Eric Klopfer, Director of MIT's Teacher Education Program and Assistant Professor of Science Education. This year's MIT session, held in July, hosted about 20 participants, primarily high school teachers from the Boston-Cambridge area. While most specialize in science and math, a few teach social studies, English, or business computing.

StarLogo
At the center of the workshop is StarLogo, a programmable modeling environment developed at MIT's Media Lab. It was designed for creating models of decentralized systems, in which pat- terns emerge from interactions among many individual objects. Such systems include bird flocks that arise from interactions among many birds, and traffic jams that result from interactions among many cars. Building a model in StarLogo consists of writing simple rules for individual behaviors; it does not require advanced programming or mathematical skills.

Participants are given challenges that fit many disciplines, for which they analyze, design, and build models and simulations in StarLogo. For example, one challenge is to model the interactions of creatures with their environment.

New Ways of Thinking
The workshop also enhances the teachers' thinking about science. Non-computer exercises help them visualize systems in new ways and encourage abstract thinking. Abstraction is key in paring ideas down to the essentials needed to get a problem across. If a model is too elaborate, students may have difficulty manipulating and testing it to get meaningful results.

Modeling also helps the teachers think about how to present science to students as something other than rote exercises. Modeling a system parallels the usual methods of scientific investigation: take an idea, create a model, experiment, revise the model, experiment again, revise again. Along the way, you may find out it is all wrong, but you may also see new, better approaches to solving the problem.

Workshop participants take away at least one completed project to use in their classes, as well as the methods to work on their own. Follow-up by Klopfer and his team, and an email list among participants, provide ongoing support and exchange of ideas. Back at school, the teachers report improvement in students' understanding of science, numbers and relationships, and problem solving.

New Companion Book
The workshop has served as the basis for a book, Adventures in Modeling: Exploring Complex, Dynamic Systems with StarLogo by Vanessa Colella, Eric Klopfer, and Mitchell Resnick (Teachers College Press, 2001). For details, see http://www.media.mit.edu/starlogo/adventures/

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